Sciblogs ignores climate facts

Greenpeace went in to bat for the seabirds killed off by a bit of oil from the Rena – good on them. But they had a big, juicy agenda – killing off deep sea oil drilling near NZ. So they exaggerated the few Rena bird deaths. The 1300 little bodies collected became 20,000 dead, without evidence to justify the expansion.

Then they claimed that 1000 times more again “could” perish in a spill the size of the Gulf of Mexico disaster. That would mean 20 million dead birds. Well, that was ambiguously tentative, although they said later they weren’t talking just about bird deaths.

Sciblogs editor Peter Griffin wrote the story up yesterday, but he can’t help revealing his bias against climate scepticism because he ends up claiming, effectively, that climate sceptics don’t keep to the science.

Just stick to the science. Both Greenpeace – and the climate sceptics, would be more convincing if they did so – and the public better informed of the true seriousness of the issues.

What is unscientific about pointing out there has been no significant global warming for 15 years? It’s true enough, look at the graph – while carbon dioxide trends relentlessly higher, the temperature is not doing likewise:

Are you an ECO POET? Climate science needs YOU
Creative writing and global warming formally allied

The dividing line between creative writing and climate science – sometimes thin – has been triumphantly dissolved. A new postgraduate course at the University of East Anglia hopes to bring together “researchers in the environmental sciences, philosophy, history and literature to develop new ways of thinking about environmental change and social transitions”.

And put that thermometer down. If you have experience writing “eco-poetry”, then the UEA wants to hear from you.

It’s the brainchild of Mike Hulme, senior scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, founder of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and IPCC lead reviewer, features in the Climategate emails.

The one-year MA/MSc in Environmental Sciences and Humanities also “aims to initiate and foster fundamental academic inquiry as well as encouraging practical and effective action.”

All stirring stuff.

UEA, the heart of the Climategate emails, already runs a project in “eco poetry” aimed at primary school children, intended to “stimulate and strengthen children’s environmental awareness”. You can see a leaf haiku here.

It isn’t cheap, though. The course costs £5,000 for UK students and £11,900 for overseas students.

Hulme’s motivation is that climate is too scientific. “The new climate reductionism is driven by the hegemony exercised by the predictive natural sciences over contingent, imaginative and humanistic accounts of social life and visions of the future,” he wrote.

“Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence,” he wrote in 2009.

And Hulme is nothing if not ambitious:

“The idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.”

He certainly has a way with words.

Heartless cynics at the Bishop Hill blog are describing it as a waste of taxpayer’s money.